


Celebrity in Reverse

by skivingsnaccbox



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Rigel Black Chronicles - murkybluematter, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Elizabeth Bowen, Hansy - Freeform, Inspired by The Rigel Black Chronicles, No Beta, PANSY I love Pansy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:20:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29328429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skivingsnaccbox/pseuds/skivingsnaccbox
Summary: A series of Pansy/Harry drabbles (some romantic, some platonic) inspired by/incorporating the war writing of Elizabeth Bowen.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	Celebrity in Reverse

**Author's Note:**

> A significant portion of this is pulled right from EB's 'The Heat of the Day'. Will be noted at the end.
> 
> Background about EB (unnecessary to read, feel free to skip):  
> Elizabeth Bowen was an Anglo-Irish aristocratic who wrote about the fall of the Anglo-Irish society and was notable for her incredible war writing, particularly in her book 'The Last September', about the Irish War of Independence, and in 'The Heat of the Day' about WWII/The Blitz. THotD is essentially if Virginia Woolf wrote a spy novel. I strongly recommend both!!
> 
> EB was torn between her passion for/love for her Anglo-Irish society and her knowledge that it was based on a moral wrong/the repression of the Irish. She was aware that it was falling and should fall, but she was still mourning a way of life that was aesthetically beautiful and, she felt, special and unique. She's often called a "minor Virginia Woolf" because of her stylistic similarities, which is a reduction of a woman who battled with particular political and social complications that VW did not. Also, she spied on the Irish (on their perspectives on Irish neutrality) for the British during WWII, which was seen as a major betrayal-- but also resulted in some of the most literary and elegant spy reports of all time. She was undeniably incredibly flawed, but a fascinating figure in the period.
> 
> An aristocrat struggling with the place of her society and the knowledge of its moral ills (national, colonial, sexist/sexual) who simultaneously loves being an aristocrat and enjoys her position is, imho, Pansy. Literally half of the quotes I pull feel relevant to Pansy, as you will come to find. So here goes!

“Oh Rig—Harry,” Pansy corrected herself abruptly. She pulled away, walked to the dirty window of the Lower Alleys flat. The street below was a mess of conflicting flickers of light, a mass of shapes so deeply unfamiliar to any world Pansy Parkinson had ever inhibited that she wasn’t sure that if she opened the window the world would still be there at all. “Harry,” Pansy confirmed, to herself more than to the sweaty, shaking ball on the couch. She turned away from the window, restless, and walked back towards the center of the room. The girl known as Rigel only hours before lay there, entirely Rigel-like, staring up at the ceiling with an eerie absence of mind. “Is there anything you need me to do?”

“No,” Harry. “I’ve set up the apartment, taken my shower—“ Harry paused, looked at herself. “This sweat’s fresh. My temperature is all wonky, still. Adrenaline.” She rubbed at her forehead, and continued, “I’ve gotten rid of anything incriminating. And this apartment, all of it, it’s paid for and ready and supposedly hidden.” Harry muttered, “I still don’t understand how you found it.”

“You—Rigel—told us you were going to marry Harriet. That you wanted us to get along,” Pansy said. “I needed to know more about what Harriet liked, so I had her followed and investigated.” She paused, but Harry didn’t move or make a sound, as if the information itself was meaningless. Pansy continued falteringly, “A few hours ago, what I found suddenly made sense. And the address in my society book became the first, best place to look.”

“Does Draco know?” Harry asked. There was no emotion in her voice—it had been leeched away in place of the magic she had just barely managed to save.

“Of course not,” Pansy said. “I would trust him with my life, but not with this. Not now. He has no control over his emotions. He’s going mad, everyone’s going mad.” She stopped her pacing. “Oh Rig—“ she paused, and bit out, “Harry”—as if angry at the name—“ _this_ is crazy. You’ve done something mad!” She pressed a palm against her forehead. “How have you not gone insane, lying to everyone around you for so long?”

“What I’ve been doing’s not mad but it may breed a madness of one kind: you feel secure. Somehow you feel encased. Quite soon danger loses the smell it had for you— you know it’s there, but only because you know it must be there. You know it’s its business to shift its angle, and you watch; but it does not seem to renew itself or to renew its hold on you, like love does. Before you know what’s happened it’s an abstraction,” Harry said. Each word wandered around the dark corners of the grimy apartment lazily, as if aware their journey was short—to Pansy, and nowhere else. Harry continued, “When danger’s inherent in what one’s doing it comes to seem an attribute of one’s own—a sort of secret peculiarity one can keep in play. To be a halfblood girl in secret gets to be like being a sort of celebrity in reverse: being set apart from people becomes familiar…”

“But you must have known you would get caught, known how many enemies you have made yourself,” Pansy insisted as Harry’s voice trailed off and her head turned down against the pillow.

“Yes, of course in theory I’ve known there _were_ other brains, brains against me—the essential of what I’ve done has been to have to be careful; and I have been careful. Careful?—the thing has come to be second nature with me: never let up, night or day. I’ve never been off my guard—  
have I?”

“Not until you got drunk,” Pansy half-joked, and the joke felt like an invasion in the island of Harry’s collapsing world. After a long pause, she confirmed, “No, you’ve never been off guard.”

As if she hadn’t spoken, Harry said, “And yet at the same time, all this time, it’s been becoming more and more inconceivable to me that this _could_ happen—You’d say, loss of sense of reality? You could be in one way right—I could only do what I’ve done so intensively that outside it there came to be nothing else.”

“But there is more,” Pansy said. She ran a finger down Harry’s sweaty brow. Pansy controlled every thought, every second of herself. Already, she was training her own mind to erase Rigel from the figure in front of her. This was someone else, an imposter—an imposter who, nonetheless, she owed a debt of friendship. “There is a great deal outside of _this_ , outside of the moment. Outside of the lie.”

“Yes,” Harry sighed. The idea that there was more—that there was a world out there—didn’t seem to bother her very much. As if the collapse of her unreal had also collapsed, for her, the real. Without the lie, she herself had—at least briefly—ceased to exist.

Pansy looked at her, little more than outlines in the dim moonlight seeping in through the window. “The more will still be there later,” she said. “Sleep now. I’ll keep watch.”

“Why?” Harry asked, not looking at Pansy. “I lied to you.”

Pansy exhaled. “Not about being a liar.” She waited, but Harry stayed silent. Pansy said, “I know you said being set apart became familiar—but I always knew you were set apart. And so you were never out of my sight.”

“Were you one of the brains against me?”

“Never against,” Pansy said. “But perhaps I was part of the danger. I won’t be, anymore. Go to sleep.”

“I don’t know who will wake up,” Harry said. “I don’t know where myself and my secrets and my danger separate.”

Pansy snorted. “A celebrity in reverse, right? I like celebrities, whatever the direction. Go to sleep, and we'll figure it out tomorrow.”

Harry settled, her lanky body a fully-clothed line lying on top of the haphazardly-tossed throw blanket. Pansy moved back to lean against the window-frame.

“Pansy?”

“Yes?”

“You weren’t part of the danger.”

**Author's Note:**

> Most of what Harry says here is EB: "What I've been doing" to "becomes familiar"; "Yes, of course" to "have I?"; "And yet at" to "be nothing else". 
> 
> This is just going to be me picking EB quotes and writing Hansy drabbles off of them.  
> Did I just do something atrocious and give Harry the monologue of a nazi spy? yes. Does it fit weirdly well? also yes.


End file.
